Tracing the Anthropocene is a collaborative partnership between Guildhouse and the South Australian Museum as part of the project, STEAM Incubator Series: A creative exploration of sustainability at the fusion of the Arts, Culture and Science, supported by Arts South Australia. The residency provides artists with the opportunity to access and engage with the South Australian Museum’s collection and present their research and work digitally and online for diverse audiences.
In these interactive virtual workshops, artists Susan Bruce and Tanya Voges will explore the South Australian Museum’s biological and earth sciences collections on the theme of Tracing the Anthropocene.
You can follow along and create your very own natural world-inspired art, all from the comfort of your home.
Birds have undergone adaptive processes and have changed over time to meet their environments. In this video, visual artist Susan Bruce provides step-by-step instructions on how to create your own hybrid birds inspired by the South Australian Museum’s Ornithology collection.
For this workshop you will need the three downloadable PDF resources provided below along with scissors, glue stick, coloured paper, and pencils or pencil crayons.
Susan Bruce’s practice includes moving image work, experimental short films, collage, drawings, prints and artist books. Her work has been shown in Australia, Europe and the United States in galleries, video and film festivals, and public spaces including the outside of buildings and the large screens outside a football Stadium.
Her current work uses practices of drawing, painting and collage to distort and fragment newspaper and magazine clippings for the purpose of creating new environments. Underlying the work is an engagement with current day events, including catastrophic weather, housing insecurity, and the global movement of refugees, environmental and natural world precarity.
In 2016, she was one of 10 South Australian artists to participate in Vitalstatistix’s national art hothouse Adhocracy, to perform Lz Dunn’s Aeon a new work involving sound and audience to perform the concept of “bird flocking”.
As an artist, Susan is inspired by the textural qualities of film and the interrelationship between digital and analogue. Her process upends the ‘normal’ hierarchy between analogue and digital: her collages serve as the material that is manipulated and textured to form her digital work, and vice versa.
Ediacaran fossils are evidence of some of the oldest known complex, multicellular animal life on Earth. The Ediacaran fossils held by the South Australian Museum provide insight into how these creatures may have moved and lived up to 635 million years ago. In this video, artist Tanya Voges will demonstrate a symmetrical drawing technique you can try at home and how to move your body inspired by the lines of the Ediacaran fossils.
For this workshop you will need the downloadable PDF resource provided below along with a drawing partner (if possible!), paper, and any type of drawing implement (e.g. charcoal, pastels, pencils or texters).
Dance Artist Tanya Voges creates choreography for theatre and gallery spaces which invite the viewer to engage, participate, feel immersed in memory, embodiment and explore trace
Tanya resides and makes work on the unceeded lands of the Peramangk peoples of the Adelaide Hills. She is part of the Artist Residence in Motherhood, an open source residency created by Lenka Clayton, to use the constraints of Motherhood as parameters to make work, not see them as obstacles. She has created an alternative mothers’ group MAMAA- Mother Artists Making Art, Australia which has both an online community and studio sharing in Adelaide.
Engaging with collaborators of various disciplines, she brings her experience in dance, drawing, community engagement and dance film making to make multimedia performance works, live dance pieces and dance for screen.
A 2004 Graduate of the Victorian College of the Arts, in Dance, she has furthered her research into choreographic strategies by attending workshops at Critical Path in Sydney and travelling to NYC to undertake internship with Punchdrunk/Emmersive Theatre’s show Sleep No More and to research interactive performance modalities.
Presenting Partners: Government of South Australia | South Australian Museum | Guildhouse
Supporting Partner: Floodlight